This specification relates generally to information systems.
Users seeking to translate text or speech from one language into another often accomplish this through the use of machine translation systems. Like translation done by humans, machine translation does not simply involve substituting words in one language for words in another, but the application of complex linguistic knowledge.
Accurate translation requires an understanding of the text, which includes an understanding of the situation and a variety of facts. Grammatical rules can be memorized or programmed, but without real knowledge of a language, a computer simply looks up words in a dictionary and has no way to select between alternate meanings. Sometimes a name will be misinterpreted as a word or the wrong sense will be chosen for a word that can be used in multiple senses. To provide users an understanding of how text was translated, user interfaces to machine translation services often provide a way to view the untranslated text with the translated text so users can refer back to the original text. Typically, this is accomplished by interleaving the original text and translated text, providing the translated text in a separate window or frame.